Bringing a new twist to the online publishing market, Google has announced another contender against the online news segments of Apple and Facebook. It is working with 30 publishers to test a new program, Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages. Those publishers will determine whether Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages lives up to its promise of speeding up page load times across the web.
Currently, mobile websites lag behind apps in speed and ease of hosting images. Each time a mobile user opens a publisher’s website, the site has to connect with the server, lengthening load time. Users, frustrated by boring waits, often give up before a site has fully loaded. Frequently, they simply walk away, causing publishers to lose precious readers.
With the Accelerated Mobile Pages project, or AMP, Google aims to drastically alter that scenario. It aspires to load pages instantaneously, even if they include video, graphics, and animations. Currently, publishers limit the amount of graphics they include on their sites since slow load times and alienate readers. If AMP fulfills its intentions, they will be able to freely add videos and graphics.